Life is a Beautiful Thing (4-Book Box Set)

by Harmon Cooper

  His strangled gacking noises were all the reply she needed.

  She took longer to strangle him than was strictly necessary. She’d let him get a gasping breath of life and then she’d bear back down, all the while whispering vileness into his ear as he clawed and scrabbled at her arms.

  When his bladder and bowels finally let go, she hung on for an extra minute, just to be sure, and then popped his skull off his spinal column, just to be really sure. The day hadn’t started out especially well, but she did finally get to kill an asshole with her bare hands, so it wasn’t a total wash.

  “I need legs,” Rinchi announced to the Humandroids left in the room. “I’ll save whoever has ocs and is willing to help me find a pair of legs around here. I know where the four of you are now – do not fuck with me.”

  “It would be an honor and a pleasure to help you,” a soft, masculine voice said.

  _∞_

  Beyoncé, Murika, Rav and Walt sat handcuffed in an old prisoner transport aeros. Three gunsels sat with them, weapons on their laps. In the separate driver’s cabin were two more cartel members; four additional vehicles escorted their transport aeros. Murika heard an aeroscycle zip by, likely ridden by another armed matón.

  They were completely surrounded.

  “He’s going to feed us to his fucking pits … ” Beyoncé’s bottom lip jutted out. She was next to Murika, across from Rav. “This is some super bullshit right here. Let me in a room with that motherfucker and I’ll figure this shit out real quick. Y’all will see.”

  Walt said almost philosophically, “Idle threats leave dogs unimpressed.”

  “Nothing idle about it,” Beyoncé said indignantly. “I’m just saying I could whoop that greasy little vato’s ass, Manuel, or whatever the fuck his name is. That’s all.”

  “I know you could,” Rav said, who was chained next to Walt. “You are one of the toughest reps I know.”

  She smiled over at him. “You still ain’t getting a date even if you do figure a way out of all this.”

  “We already went on a date!”

  “No, we went to see a movie.”

  “It was a romantic comedy!”

  “The Avengers: Tampontron wasn’t a romantic comedy.”

  Rav shook his head. “In my country, we would consider the threesome between Iron Man, The Hulk and Black Widow romantic, or at least sexual enough to be censored, which is romantic enough. That scene was very explicit, but sweet in a way.”

  “Cultural differences,” Beyoncé said. “Y’all’s people are backwards.”

  Murika glanced over at the three thugs watching them. Either they didn’t understand English or they were pretending not to. In a casual, conversational tone, he said “You know, we can get out of here now. I’ve got plastic explosive implants in my legs. I can blow up the guards any time I want.”

  Without appearing to, Walt examined the guards. One was assiduously mining a nostril with a pointer finger and carefully scrutinizing the results; the second was scratching crotch, armpits and scalp in a way that strongly suggested all three species of teeny-tiny lodgers; the third was riveted on some game on his hand-held device that beeped and booped and honked and tweeted most annoyingly.

  “Hell no they don’t understand us,” Beyoncé said. “I could have told y’all that. Shit watch – listen everyone, I have a PHASR built into my arm. Just hold tight real quick. I’ll kill these guards first, and then I’ll kill the people up front. After that, I’ll go to their mamas’ houses and kill their whole families.”

  “Could … ” Walt decided not to say Manuel’s name. “Could he really be this stupid?” he whispered.

  “I don’t know. Who speaks Spanish?” Murika asked. “I speak Urdu, Pashto, Farsi, and Esperanto.”

  Beyoncé said, “American.”

  Walt said, “German, French, Standard Chinese and Cantonese.”

  “I do,” Rav said. “I speak Spanish.”

  “You do?” Beyoncé asked.

  “Good,” Murika said. “Say something.”

  “Lo siento, amigos. Tirarse un pedo…”

  All three guards looked up. Señor Scratchy raised his hand in front of his face as if he were waving a foul odor away.

  Beyoncé tightened her lips to cover her smile. “Shit, when did you learn Spanish? I didn’t think there were any Mexicans in India.”

  “Nepal…” he reminded her.

  Murika said, “Well, it appears as if we can discuss a plan freely.”

  “Unless the walls have ears.” Walt glanced to the inside corners of the transport vehicle.

  “Man, these walls don’t have ears. Look at this shitty transport vehicle,” Beyoncé said. “It’s from 2025 or something. Older than my grandma, that’s for damn sure.”

  Murika looked down at their feet. The guards hadn’t chained Walt or Beyoncé’s legs.

  Walt caught on very quickly. “Beyoncé,” he said, “I want you to lure them over here.”

  “How?”

  Rav said, “Act sick and I’ll tell them you need to lie down.”

  “That won’t work,” Murika said. “They can’t possibly be that stupid.”

  “You’re right. We’ll use your plan, then.” Walt stated with surprising placidity.

  “I don’t have a plan yet,” Murika admitted.

  “Okay then. I’m thinking that a stupid plan now is a whole lot better than your great plan after we’re dead. Bey – act sick.”

  “Got it.” Beyoncé scrunched up her face and lurched forward, making the most gawd-awful gagging and retching noises. “Yo, I’m sick over here! Damn! Something is wrong with me! It hurts, yo … it hurts! Please! Please … ” She spit and drooled and gagged and retched for all she was worth.

  Rav turned to the guards and said, “¡Oye! Ella necesita ayuda!”

  Beyoncé writhed, her wrists cuffed to the wall of the aeros. “Help!” she pleaded, as she turned up her performance and faked an epileptic seizure. “Someone help me! Shit y’all, I’m dying over here!”

  “¡Ayuda!” Rav screamed.

  “YO, I AM HURTING OVER HERE!”

  The guards looked at one another, obviously reluctant to have to deal with this.

  “Help!” Beyoncé pleaded, full on crying now. “Shit, it hurts! Please, oh, the pain … the pain … help!”

  Gameboy and Nozo stood, leaving Señor Scratchy with his weapon – some sort of bulky AK-309 with a PHASR attachment – trained on the four representatives. The two guards made their way over to Beyoncé.

  YO, I AM HURTING OVER HERE!”

  Murika calculated the angle in which the approaching guard would need to fall for him to strip him of his weapon and shoot Señor Scratchy. This was unlikely to work, but it was still better than ending up as highly trained dogfood.

  “¿Cual es el problema?” said Nozo, as he leaned in.

  Beyoncé came up off the seat like she was rocket propelled in zero-gravity, wrapped her legs around Nozo’s neck and snapped it like a breadstick as she and Mother Gravity bore him to the floor.

  Gameboy launched his weapon out and away when Walt doubled him over with a knee to the huevos. Walt flipped him on his back with the knee to the face, and then smashed his trachea with a combat-booted heel.

  The Goddess of Serendipitous Occurrences smiled on Murika.

  Gameboy’s AK hit him in the chest and he trapped it with an elbow. Señor Scratchy had his shooting hand down his pants and an expression of slack-jawed amazement on his pimpled and mustachioed face as Murika got a hand on the pistol grip and put three rounds in his chest.

  The gunfire caused the driver to deploy the airbrake and head for the ground. “Gun!” Beyoncé shouted as the small viewing window at the front of the prisoner compartment slid open and a muzzle appeared.

  “Cover!” Murika yelled as he one-handed the AK-309 and put three rounds into the face on the other side of the viewing window.

  “All that’s left is the driver,” Murika said, taking a deep breath. “I c
an’t believe that actually worked.”

  Walt smiled bitterly. “The fun isn’t over yet. Now we need to figure a way out of these handcuffs before we hit the ground.”

  “Too late,” said Beyoncé. Sure enough, all four reps felt a change in gravity as the aeros began its final descent. “They are going to be pissed.”

  “There may be one more option ... ” Murika looked at Walt grimly.

  “I’ll take the bullet,” Walt finally said. “I trust you.”

  _∞_

  “Two Minutes to drop zone! Two Minutes!” advised the pilot.

  The Super Osprey containing Clove, Keva and Monique was a few minutes away from the private airfield in Tijuana, an airstrip that deserves a backstory due to the frequency it appears in our story. The airfield used to belong to El Chapo, the famous Mexican drug kingpin known for his unique ability to escape prison. In fact, there is still a tunnel under the airfield that contained a massage parlor, a (now defunct) Baskin-Robbins, a 50cc motorcycle and central cooling. El Chapo used the airfield before he was extradited to America, where he was promptly sent to a black site in Egypt and held prisoner for six months, which he was also able to escape from via a camel and a shit-ton of dynamite, eventually making his way to Southern Sudan where he died of dysentery.

  “How did you two become MercSecure reps?” Keva asked as she drummed her hands along her PHASR RNG8. She had been thinking about Rinchi when the question came to her – not that she really cared, but anything to distract her and fill the silence.

  “Seriously?” Clove asked.

  “Yeah, seriously.”

  After staring at her skeptically for a moment, he took another bite of his Soylent Adreno bar spoke to her while chewing. “We joined MercSecure after our brother was killed in the Arctic Oil Incident some years back”

  “Most people don’t know about that,” Keva said.

  “Yeah, well, the FCG controls the news, so they could downplay the US casualties and spin it the way they wanted. It also helped that most of the ten thousand dead were Russian, because who cares about a bunch of dead Ruskies, right?”

  “True.” Keva tried to grin.

  She’d had several missions in Russia, and the two things she liked best about Putin Junior’s Stalinist Revival was the borscht and the way that most Russian people essentially ignored anything and everything that happened around them. You could be fucking in the street a stone’s throw away from the Kremlin and if you weren’t picked up by the FSB, most people would just walk right past you, a studied and institutional obliviousness that some countries could benefit from. Over a century and a half of perfecting the art of keeping one’s head down makes for good citizenry. The less attention one receives the better.

  “Our brother was with the first group of reps who fought in the incident. After he was killed, a MercSecure staff member came to our reservation…”

  “So you two really lived on a reservation?”

  “Cherokee Country.”

  “You’re Cherokee?”

  “No, we’re Natchez,” said Clove, “but the FCG lumped us all together in the same spot.”

  “So both of you lived on a reservation?”

  “Why is this so hard to understand?” Clove asked. He glanced to his sister, Monique, who was looking in Keva’s direction but not making eye contact.

  “I’m from Europe or … ” Keva’s past flashed in front of her eyes and she quickly shut Pandora’s Box. “I was from Europe, Germany to be exact. MercSecure obtained American citizenship for me, so now I am as American as Uncle Sam or collateral damage. If you didn’t know, we Europeans are interested in Native Americans due to the fact they are so rare … ” Her hand came up, pressing down the back of her white hair. “So that’s why I asked.”

  “Well, that’s what we are then.” Clove sighed. “Rare.”

  “Rare is better than well-done – or all done, I guess.” Keva licked her lips. She was trying her hardest to be smart-ass, wise-cracking, don’t-care-about-nothing-Keva, but it just wasn’t happening with all the crap she suddenly had clamoring for her attention.

  Clove continued, “Anyway, a MercSecure staff member came to tell us what a great job our brother had done in the conflict and pay us his death benefits. We talked a little bit, and he offered me a spot in their next Basic Representative Selection and Qualification Course. Hell, my only other prospect at the time was to work in one of the hundreds of casinos that now define Cherokee Nation. My sister’s options weren’t so good either.”

  “A stripper,” Monique said, still avoiding eye contact with Keva.

  “I could see you as a stripper,” Keva said. “You’re a little hottie.”

  Monique’s eyes narrowed.

  “Look at your face, your cute cheeks, your flat chest, your perfect ass. There’s a lot to like there.” Keva felt good teasing Monique – it was nice to feel like she had her spirit back, even fleetingly.

  “So I jumped on it, and as I was leaving, Monique ran out with her pink camouflage Hello Punisher backpack.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “And you?”

  “Nineteen,” Clove said. “We were part of a new program funded by Congress, in parallel with the Fed Corp Foreign Legion. The Foreign Legion comes under the Department of Aggressive Defense, but MercSecure is a private corporation; a NGMC – a Non-Governmental Military Contractor – with built-in deniability. They trained us for two years, and out of the two hundred and thirty that started in our intake, only eighteen graduated. And here we are, going with you on a suicide mission to Mexico.”

  The pilot cut in, “Thirty seconds, thirty seconds. Go on the green light.”

  Keva laughed. “Don’t be so serious. Do you really think I’m going to let my favorite two reps – after Rinchi – die at the hands of some filthy Mexicans? We have a history now, the three of us. How’d you get clean cut by the way? You’re the first Native American cyborg I’ve ever met, if that means anything to you.”

  Clove knocked his fist against his leg. “Outside Caracas, Venezuela. Fighting a couple of Trilobites alongside an Australian representative named Gyatson, dead now.”

  Clove asked, “What about you? What’s your story? How did you join MercSecure? There’s not much data about you on the main server aside from a picture.”

  The Super Osprey’s loading ramp hissed open; a rush of air filled the troop compartment and the light flashed from red to green.

  “Time to get the party started!” Keva yelled. She ran down the ramp and executed a full Gainer as she exited the aircraft.

  TWENTY-SIX∞

  We pile out of the aeros like the A-Team – Yeshi, Noah, Nelly, Baby Rebel, Tim7, Dr. Hewman and Memito. Not quite Ocean’s Eleven, but close enough, dammit. The sky is blue, beautiful, practically edible and the clouds are nonexistent, not to mention the fact that the air smells of flowers and honey-tinged bee farts.

  It doesn’t look like Dr. Hewman did much to change the sanatorium status of his compound. Aside from a paint job, the place is a throwback to the Cuba of a stricter time. The housing units are situated upon squares of neatly trimmed grass demarcated by a sidewalk, which is surrounded by potted plants, flowers with names I can’t pronounce. There doesn’t appear to be anyone around aside from us. No gardeners, no assistants, no Humandroids – nothing.

  “I’ve kept the place pretty much intact,” Dr. Hewman says, “aside from the main building where we will be staying.” He pointed down a path towards a three story complex. “I renovated this one, just in case I have guests.”

  He turns, his hands coming behind his back.

  Nelly asks, “You said this used to be an AIDS sanatorium?”

  “Yes, HIV came to Cuba in the 1990s, after Cuban soldiers returned from Angola,” he says, walking slightly ahead of us.

  “What do the Angolans have against Cubans?” I ask.

  “It was a proxy war with the United States. The Cuban soldiers returned with HIV a
nd the government reacted. They began testing anyone and everyone they could, especially high-risk individuals.”

  “High-risk individuals?”

  Dr. Hewman nods. “Yes, most notably, frikis, the name given to punk rockers. These kids used to sit on rooftops and try and get music signals from America. They grew their hair long, some had mohawks, many had tattoos. The government, of course, didn’t like these anti-social misfits.”

  “What happened if you were HIV positive?”

  Tim7 says, “If the government found out you were positive, they came to your house and arrested you. Then they took you here, to an AIDS sanatorium. There are dozens across the island.”

  A small flock of goats walks in front of us, eating the grass and twitching their little tails. I reach my hand out to let one of the goats nibble at my fingers. Some people pay good money for that kind of service, little guy.

  “They’re such optimistic creatures,” Dr. Hewman laughs. “They think everybody has treats for them.” He returns to his story as we approach the main building. “As you can imagine, it doesn’t take long for frikis – punk rockers – to get annoyed by the police. The police roughed them up, forced them to cut their hair, forced them to get multiple HIV tests. Enter Papo la Bala.”

  “Papo the Bullet,” Yeshi translates. Her hand comes out and I hold it as we take the steps that lead to the main building. Noah slows behind us, softly patting Rebel on the back and humming the NRA’s popular children’s song Guns are Fun but Not for Kids.

  “Yes, Papo the Bullet,” Dr. Hewman says, opening the door, “in all his glory.” A giant picture in the Commie Icon style of portraiture hangs can be seen in the foyer of the main building. The man portrayed shirtless, skinny, with long black hair. An American flag is tied around his head as a bandana.

  “That’s him,” Tim7 says.

  “What did he do?” I ask, approaching the picture. Candles and dried flowers sit in front of the life-sized portrait. The ancient scent of incense is heavy in the air.

  “Papo was sick of the government bothering him,” Dr. Hewman explains, “so he took matters into his own hands.”